2016-05-26
Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — This is a no-excuses budget, and you really do not need to read very far into the budget papers to understand that. First of all, the government is absolutely rolling in funds from stamp duty, and it has already been noted what a difference that has made to projections that were being produced just a short time ago. We all got a hell of a surprise when we opened up this budget and noticed exactly how much money was available to this government, or at least the amount it projects will be available to it, over the coming four years. I will return to the question of stamp duty in a moment.
It is unfortunate that with that strong position the government finds itself in, it has decided to duck the single biggest challenge that this government or any other government around the world is facing, and that is the question of global warming.
In the budget estimates process that has been run since the budget was produced, we asked the Premier specifically about what plans he had in place for the transition from our polluting coal-fired power stations through to a clean energy future, and this is what he said:
I cannot today announce to you if, when, how a very large power station will close down…
That was his answer. That is because the Premier is not a leader. I have some bad news for the Premier: you cannot make a serious impact on Victoria's greenhouse gas emissions without phasing out brown coal.
In the time that Labor has been in power, just a year and half, it has extended the life of coal exploration licences; multimillion-dollar grants for new coal-burning plants — signed by the Liberal Party, actually — have been extended; payments for solar owners have been slashed; it has kept on bulldozing, woodchipping and burning native forests unabated — that is our carbon bank that is literally going up in smoke; and it has ruled out the emissions trading scheme to put a cap on those big brown coal-powered stations in the Latrobe Valley, a mechanism which both the power plants and various experts have put forward, and it is a mechanism that it could implement under current Victorian law. If the Premier would like to turn to the Environment Protection Act, he would find in there he has already got the capacity to do it.
The review of the Climate Change Act 2010 is moving at the speed of lichen. It has become yet another excuse to do nothing, and doing nothing right now is deadly for the planet. Climate change is not an issue that you just get to push aside. The Premier has had four years in opposition and now 18 months in government to develop a response. It is not that the Premier is unaware; he is simply unwilling. Fighting climate change is in the too-hard basket for Mr Andrews and his government.
Yet government members love getting out and posing with wind turbines. Who doesn't? Even the former Premier, with a big childlike grin on his face, loved standing next to those wind turbines down in his former electorate in south-western Victoria. In fact it was Mr Shorten, together with federal Labor, who voted with Tony Abbott to slash the renewable energy target. Labor has no plan to boost renewables — just conduct yet another dithering review.
Here is a simple plan to make deep cuts to Victoria's emissions. If Labor starts today, it could have it done inside 12 months, but it would need to be backed by law. It could end native forest logging, set a state renewable energy target, set a future closing date for the big brown coal-fired power stations, make permanent a ban on new coal and new gas exploration and mining, and set an emissions target that all ministers must consider before they approve any development. If Labor put forward that program, it would have our support.
Just as we walked in here this morning we read — not as a result of any inquiry made in the Victorian estimates committee but from testimony before the French Senate — that the CEO of the French-owned company that owns and operates Hazelwood had said that she is working on a plan to either flog Hazelwood off or close it down. This is what she said, according to a report in Reuters:
For the Hazelwood plant, we are studying all possible scenarios, including closure, or a sale if the state of Victoria tells us that it cannot meet power-generating needs without this plant…
So we actually learn, from the French Parliament, that the owners of the Hazelwood power plant in Victoria are considering either its closure or its sale but that they need the state of Victoria to tell them whether it believes the energy from the plant is required to run the grid. Yet just a couple of weeks ago, when we asked the Premier, he told us, 'I can't tell you'. He said, 'I simply can't tell you if, when or how a plant like Hazelwood might close'.
I wonder what he has told Hazelwood's French owners, because according to the testimony that we read this morning it appears that they have asked the Premier what they ought to do with this particular power plant. You will have to pardon my French, Acting President Ramsay, but if the translation of the testimony by Reuters is correct, let us just say we have some further questions for the Premier and the energy minister.
Along with that, we have asked a range of ministers what the local industry transition fund in this budget is actually for — that is, it is a transition from what to what? Acting President, you would be well aware of the situation down in Geelong. It was not like Ford, Holden and Alcoa suddenly decided one night to close; there was plenty of warning given there. But when it came to the transition fund for Geelong we basically got the change we found down the back of the couch when Ford and Alcoa decided to pack up and leave.
Of course what we wanted to know about the government's transition fund is: a transition from what to what, and when? There is a big difference between business-as-usual regional development efforts to diversify industry in the Latrobe Valley region, as we are doing in the other regions in Victoria, and the imminent closure of a major employer, being a major piece of coal-fired generation that anybody from the valley and certainly anybody who observes these things can tell you is living on borrowed time.
This government does not have a plan. In fact it cannot even articulate exactly what the purpose of the transition fund is — and no wonder, because they do not want to admit that the closure of a major coal-fired power station could happen during the life of this government.
Similarly we queried with the Treasurer his new coal tax and the predicted revenue from that. In fact, caught somewhat flat-footed, he had to admit that based on the revenue projections — the extra $485 million the government expects to be getting over the next four years, which now includes the period after the 2018 election — it is going to be burning coal at the same rate down there for the next four years. That is the only logical conclusion to be drawn from looking at the impact of the revenue estimate of that coal tax. If the government is collecting coal royalties at the same rate for the next four years, it must mean it is burning coal at the same rate for the next four years. I think the Treasurer just announced the Andrews government's climate change policy: it is business as usual — keep on burning.
Just for a bit of further information, we asked the Minister for Ports whether he had a plan for sea level rise associated with the port of Melbourne — that is, the soon-to-be-sold port of Melbourne — and the answer was, 'No, we don't have a plan and we don't intend to insist that the operator have a plan', despite the fact that that port has now been privatised for a long time in the future.
Yet again we had another go with the energy minister. We asked her about these grants that the previous government provided to try to develop new uses for Latrobe Valley coal, and we found out that she really could not tell us very much about whether those projects were proceeding or not. Yet again the government is not prepared to take responsibility for the pollution that would occur — in the hundreds of thousands of tonnes — if even one of those three proposed projects got up and running.
My other Greens colleagues will come and give their presentations on the budget this week and next week, and they will cover off on the transport, human services, health and education areas of the budget. But just coming back to this question of revenue, the increased stamp duty is driven by an expected boom in property development, a boom bigger than what we have seen since before the global financial crisis (GFC) — a bubble that of course popped due to excessive speculation in property, as we now know. This whole budget and everything in it and all its future plans are underpinned by these projections of increased revenue and increased economic growth. Without those, it will be very hard to see how the government will make the sums add up.
There are some welcome projects in this budget. The Melbourne Metro rail tunnel is a project that should be supported. But let us just understand what that project does. It will cost $10 billion, it will take 10 years to build and it will increase the capacity of that group of rail lines by about 60 per cent. The Premier keeps saying 40 per cent, but he has not actually read his own business case, but in fact we learn in that same business case that by that time patronage will have grown by 60 per cent. We are spending $10 billion and we are waiting 10 years just to stand still in terms of the overcrowding. The overcrowding itself is driven by patronage growth. Patronage growth is driven by population and economic growth, and it is that growth that underpins the budget revenue cycle and the predicted increase in stamp duty.
We have been here before, and it was the last time Labor was in government. It kept receiving the population growth and banking the stamp duty, but when the merry-go-round stopped there was not enough money invested in infrastructure, and we have been struggling along ever since. It is all very well and good as long as the wheel keeps turning, but when it stops abruptly, as it did at the GFC, we suddenly find we have got a huge backlog of investment and the stamp duty that underpins that has dried up.
I am going to save a few more comments on that for when we deal with the State Taxation and Other Acts Amendment Bill 2016 without getting too much further into that particular question. But that in a nutshell is it: a no-excuses budget propped up by growth that itself brings a range of challenges that the budget itself does not fully address; and then nothing more than a cop-out on the biggest challenge that every government around the world must face, from the state to the federal to the local level, and that is the pressing need to make deep cuts to our greenhouse gas emissions. We are none the wiser, 18 months into this government, about what its plan is, and we are starting to become quite desperate for some direction from this government on that particular issue.
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